BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts

Enter the Modern Landscape
November 29, 2019–January 12, 2020

BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts
Rue Ravensteinstraat 23
1000 Brussels
Belgium

www.bozar.be

Cities are often perceived as vibrant laboratories in which certainties of the past meet with current and future societal challenges. However, at a closer look, rural areas increasingly appear to be the locus where the political, economic and social balances of entire regions are really at stake.

As our planet reaches a breaking point, it is time to critically reconsider the role of the different actors shaping such diverse territories. At a time of climate change and shifting paradigms—and of a belated assessment of the illusion we once called modernity—our man-made environment bears testimony of a growing unease about how soil and natural landscapes have been gnawed away by industry and urban sprawl.

The exhibition Enter the Modern Landscape reflects upon a European heritage made up of 20th century rural settlements, whose implementation was guided by ideologies of various kinds that have crossed and marked this century.
The exhibition aims at questioning a cultural aggregate examined through selected archival pieces—coming from a vast European academic research programme composed of hundreds of case studies throughout the continent—and other artefacts from the same period.

There is undeniably a Learning from... of these rural conditions, without omitting to set out a critical vision of this heritage for future society, thereby addressing the opportunities to shape places of coexistence outside the city and forge their collective dimensions, under the influence of a more diffuse, flexible and even informal backdrop of the 21st century.

Curators: Francelle Cane, Axel Fisher and Iwan Strauven